Parent Supplemental Income Statement - Financial Aid: Fill & Download for Free

I’m a US citizen who grew up in the UK. I’m one of those rare folks who has applied to universities in both countries.Summary: applying to US universities is more expensive and difficult than applying to UK universities. Your tuition will be higher in the US (assuming you are a UK resident but not a US citizen). Going to the US is doable, but it’s not easy.Getting acceptedChoosing a subject: Unlike in the UK, you don’t have to apply to a specific course. So, where UK universities care about whether you’re good at your subject, US universities care about whether you’re generally clever, and also whether you’re an interesting, sociable person who will contribute to their community.Words: “College” means “uni”, and what you call “college” is US “high school”.Grades: US universities will accept your GCSE, A-level and other British grades. They also want your internal grades from every term starting in Year 10, so don’t blow off your homework.Activities: US universities care a lot about your extra-curricular activities. You should read about this online or on Quora. US universities prefer applicants who have done volunteer work, been a member school clubs, gotten work experience placements, or held part-time jobs. They particularly prefer students who have held leadership positions (such as “club treasurer” or “assistant leader for younger Girl Guides troop”). Consider organizing a special event, or mentoring younger students.Standardized tests: The College Board SAT exam is an annoying, expensive, pain in the ass. But you have to go through with it.You’ll need to take both the standard Reasoning SAT exam, and 2–3 Subject Tests (such as Math, Physics, English, etc). These tests are administered in special exam centers. You will have to book your seat at the center several months in advance, and pay ~$100 to take the tests.US students study for these exams as if they were mini-GCSEs. You should probably take your exams in subjects like Maths, a Science, a Language, or English, where your GCSE subjects will cover all the necessary material, rather than in subjects like History, where you’ll have to learn a lot of new facts.(If you come from a low-income family, you can do some extra paperwork and ask not to pay the test fee. There is also an alternative exam, called the ACT, but to the best of my knowledge it is not offered in Britain).Application fees: US universities charge ~$50-$90 per application. You must also pay $16 per application to send your SAT scores to each school (these fees can again be waived for low-income applicants).Writing the applications: Most US universities - but not all - accept applications through a system called the CommonApp. It’s a bit like UCAS except that instead of writing a subject-specific personal statement, you write two personal essays. Many universities will also ask “supplemental questions”. All of these essays take time; you should start writing 1–3 months in advance.These essays are unlike anything you’ll write in school, so read some examples online. Basically, you want to show that (1) you can write nicely; (2) you’re not a horrible person; (3) you’ve done something interesting at least once in your life; and (4) you plan to do something interesting at uni.DO say, “Since organizing my town’s Sad Kitten fundraiser, I have wanted to work in animal rights. I am looking forward to volunteering at the animal shelter in University City.”DO say, “My favorite YouTube channel is called Insane Exploding Science… At university I would like to work in a Nanophysics laboratory where I can run experiments of my own.”DO NOT mention mention mental illness, social anxiety, racist/sexist/controversial beliefs, or criminal behavior. Tread very carefully around religion and politics.Good behavior: If you’ve ever been suspended from school, or arrested for drugs, forget it. US universities are very strict about this, and you’ll be better off if you apply in the UK.Paying tuitionHow much does it cost? First you apply and get accepted, then they tell you how much it costs. They will give you the tuition (published online, $20,000 - $45,000 per year for internationals) and then subtract some part of the cost as scholarship and/or financial aid.What about food and housing? This is included in the cost estimate above. You can live in a dorm on campus, or rent an apartment. Many universities have hilariously expensive meal plans (think $6000/year). Some universities require that you live in dorms, and/or have a meal plan, which will increase your living costs significantly - check these rules in advance.Your parents have to do paperwork. If you want to get any financial aid or scholarships, you must submit your and your parents’ taxes to the university, using a form called the CSS. The paperwork is annoying, and will take at least a couple of days. You must do this every year to keep your scholarship(s).How can an international student get a scholarship?You’re not eligible for US government funding, so you need to get funding from your university. That means you want to go to a university that is rich enough to pay you out of their own pockets.Full financial aid - means that if you’re admitted, the school will cover anything that your family cannot (though they will suck your family dry, first). As of 2010, five US universities, including MIT and Harvard offered this to internationals. These five schools are obviously popular with international applicants, and insanely competitive if you don’t have US citizenship - think 2% admit rates.Conditional aid - means that the school may or may not offer you funding, depending on how badly they want you to attend. You won’t find out until after you apply. Aim for middle-ranked schools where you would be an unusually strong student.Scholarships are usually contingent on good academic performance, such as maintaining high grades. Ask yourself, “What would happen if I got sick and failed a class? Would I go broke?”How many years must you pay for? US university usually takes four years, instead of three. Here at CU-Boulder, most undergraduates take more than four years, especially if they follow difficult courses such as engineering. That means paying an extra year’s worth of tuition.In short: apply, get accepted, then you’ll know how much it costs. Before you go, ask lots and lots of questions and make sure you know about any hidden costs (such as mandatory meal plans or student fees).I hope this helps! If you decide to apply, you’re welcome to message me.

Q. Is it true that some students at Brown University get food stamps because they’re smart enough to be attending Brown but are broke?A. Low income students at Brown are offered full scholarships that cover tuition, room and board. Their meal plans are covered by the Brown scholarship. They do not need, nor are they qualified for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Food Stamps. The above statement is not true.What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school? - The Boston GlobeAlejandro Claudio can eat whenever he wants at the Ratty, the campus dining hall, because his meal plan is covered by his Brown scholarship. During his first semester, friends looked at him like he had five heads when he said he’d never tasted falafel, kebabs, or curry. He had immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 8. “Growing up in a poor family, we ate the same thing every night: rice, beans, and chicken,” he says.Am I Eligible for SNAP?What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school? - The Boston GlobeThe son of an MBTA bus driver from Jamaica Plain, Harvard sophomore Ted White helps lead the First Generation Student Union, pushing for a better understanding of challenges financially disadvantaged students face.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFFBy Brooke Lea FosterAPRIL 09, 2015WHEN ANA BARROS first stepped into Harvard Yard as a freshman, she felt so out of place she might as well have had the words “low income” written on her forehead. A girl from Newark doesn’t belong in a place like Harvard, she thought, as she marveled at how green the elms were, how quaint the cobblestone streets. Back home, where her family lives in a modest house bought from Habitat for Humanity, there wasn’t always money for groceries, and the world seemed gray, sirens blaring at all hours. Her parents, who immigrated to the New York area from Colombia before she was born, spoke Spanish at home. It was at school that Barros learned English. A petite 5-foot-2 with high cheekbones and a head of model-worthy hair, Barros found out in an e-mail that she’d been accepted to Harvard — a full scholarship would give her the means to attend. “I knew at that moment that I’d never suffer in the way that my parents did,” she says.She opted for a single her freshman year, because she felt self-conscious about sharing a room with someone from a more privileged background. “All you see are class markers everywhere, from the way you dress to the way you talk,” says Barros, now a junior sociology major, as she sits in a grand, high-ceilinged space off the dining room in her Harvard College dorm. During her freshman and sophomore years, Barros hesitated to speak in class because she often mispronounced words — she knew what they meant from her own reading, but she hadn’t said many aloud before, and if she had, there had been no one to correct her. Friends paired off quickly. “You’d get weeded out of friendships based on what you could afford. If someone said let’s go to the Square for dinner and see a movie, you’d move on,” she says. Barros quickly became close with two other low-income students with whom she seemed to have more in common. She couldn’t relate to her peers who talked about buying $200 shirts or planning exotic spring break vacations. “They weren’t always conscious of how these conversations can make other people feel,” she says. In a recent sociology class, Barros’s instructor asked students to state their social class to spark discussion. “Middle,” said one student. “Upper class,” said another. Although she’d become accustomed to sharing her story with faculty, Barros passed. It made her uncomfortable. “Admitting you’re poor to your peers is sometimes too painful,” she says. “Who wants to be that one student in class speaking for everyone?”For generations, attending an Ivy League college has been practically a birthright for children of the nation’s most elite families. But in 2004, in the hopes of diversifying its student body and giving low-income, high-achieving students a chance at an Ivy League education, Harvard announced a game-changing financial aid campaign: If a student could get in, the school would pick up the tab. (Princeton was the first Ivy to offer poor families the option, in 1998; Yale followed Harvard in 2005.) Families with incomes of less than $40,000 would no longer be expected to contribute to the cost of their student’s education. (In recent years, income eligibility has increased to $65,000, with significant grants awarded to families that make up to $150,000.) Having since been adopted, in one form or another, by all the Ivies, this “zero family contribution” approach opened the gilded doors of top colleges for many of the country’s most disadvantaged students. The number of students awarded a Pell Grant — financial aid of as much as $5,700 given to those with a family income of up to 250 percent of the poverty line, or about $60,000 for a family of four — is considered the best indicator of how many are low-income. At Harvard, where tuition, room, and board is estimated at $58,600, the Pell is a very small part of a student’s financial aid package. Last year, 19.3 percent of eligible Harvard students were awarded a Pell, an 80 percent increase since the admissions policy began 11 years ago. At Brown University, 15 percent of students get a Pell, and at Yale, 14 percent do.But receiving a full scholarship to an Ivy League school, while a transformative experience for the nation’s poorest students, is only the first hurdle. Once on campus, students report feelings of loneliness, alienation, and plummeting self-confidence. Having grant money for tuition and fees and holding down jobs, too, as virtually all of them do, doesn’t translate to having the pocket money to keep up with free-spending peers. And some disadvantaged students feel they don’t have a right to complain to peers or administrators about anything at all; they don’t want to be perceived as ungrateful.“IT’S TOTAL CULTURE SHOCK,” says Ted White, a Harvard sophomore. White grew up working class in Jamaica Plain and graduated as valedictorian (he was one of the only white kids in his senior class) from New Mission High School in Hyde Park; his father is an MBTA bus driver. From the start, the Harvard campus didn’t seem built for a kid from a background like his, he says. Classmates came in freshman year having started businesses or nonprofits (usually with their parents’ resources, he says) that could make even a top student wonder if he belonged. “The starting place for all of us isn’t really the same,” he says. White appreciates, for example, that Harvard gives low-income students free tickets to the freshman formal, but they have to pick up the tickets in a different line from everyone else. “It’s clear who is getting free/reduced tickets and who isn’t,” he says — a situation a Harvard spokesperson says the school is working to remedy. At times, White wondered if he’d made the right choice going to Harvard, even if he saw his matriculation, like many low-income students do, as his one shot at leaving his family’s financial struggles behind for good.RELATED LINKSMaribel Claudio makes the sign of the cross on her son's head before he heads back to Brown.View GalleryPhotos: Class distinctionsRead: How did colleges become country clubs?Stephen Lassonde, dean of student life at Harvard College, says first-generation students have it particularly tough because they’re wrestling with their identities, like all students, while simultaneously trying to transcend their socioeconomic backgrounds. “As much as we do to try to make them feel included, there are multiple ways that their roommates and peers can put them on the outside without even intending to,” he says.Today, White, a sociology major, is vice president of Harvard’s First Generation Student Union, an advocacy and support network seeking to create positive institutional change for students whose parents never attended a four-year-college; Barros is the president. To hear them talk about it, the union has become a haven for Harvard’s poorest students, even if “first generation” doesn’t always mean poor. Low-income kids claimed the term when they realized how much easier it was to admit they were struggling partly because they were the first in their family to go to college, and not simply because they were poor, says Dan Lobo, who founded the union in 2013. Raised by Cape Verdean immigrant parents in Lynn — his dad cooks and his mom waits tables at hotels near Logan — Lobo spent a few tough years “trying to transition to Harvard.” After having dinner with two classmates in similar circumstances who also felt like an “invisible minority” on campus and struggled to make friends and keep up academically, Lobo decided to “come out” as a low-income, first-generation student and organized the First Generation Student Union. Urging others to talk more openly about how their background influenced their college experience, he sought to create a community that could advocate for change on campus. “At the time, no one was talking about first-gen issues at all,” says Lobo, who has since graduated (with highest honors) and works for a nonprofit that helps students of color get into elite private high schools. “It’s like Harvard was committed to admitting underprivileged kids, but then we got here and they didn’t know what to do with us.”Freshman Alejandro Claudio navigates a different world at Brown. “If I fail, I’m going back to poverty, to working in a factory,” he says.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFFAs at Harvard, low-income students at Yale and Brown have suggested administrators could do more to help them develop a sense of belonging. And they, too, have been organizing — Undergraduate First Generation Low Income Partnership sprang up in 2014 at Yale. At Brown, three students, including a Mexican-American kid from California named Manuel Contreras, started 1vyG, the Inter-Ivy, First Generation College Student Network, in January 2014. Contreras’s group organized a three-day conference this February that brought together students and administrators from other schools to share information and learn from one another. “Brown wasn’t made for students like us,” Contreras, a cognitive science major, often tells fellow members, “but we have to make it ours.”All the groups are seeking greater visibility on campus: a more open dialogue about what it means to be a first-generation student at an Ivy League school, dedicated staff to serve as support, and a list of best practices so Ivies can use their abundant resources to ensure their most disadvantaged students are as equipped to succeed as other students. If the infrastructure at an Ivy League school assumes everyone comes from a certain socioeconomic background, as some first-generation students say, then change needs to come at an institutional level. Dining halls at some schools, for example, close for spring break, though some students can’t afford to leave campus. While tuition, room, and board may be covered. some universities tack on a “student fee” ranging from a few hundred to as much as a thousand dollars, an amount that can be devastating to those trying to figure out how to pay for books.Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, grew up in Queens as the son of a teacher in the Bronx. “We have to do a better job at making sure every student feels comfortable here,” says Khurana, who recently organized a task force to that end. In December, Harvard appointed two first-generation liaisons — one in the office of financial aid, the other in the office of career services — to help ease the transition for students. In January, Jason Munster, a first-generation low-income graduate student in environmental sciences and engineering from Maine, was named Harvard College’s first “first-generation tutor.” If you’re poor and struggling, Munster is the person you can go to for help. With an undergraduate degree from Harvard, Munster is also the campus liaison for the Harvard First Generation Alumni Network, founded around the same time as the First Generation Student Union.Still, students complain that Harvard worries too much about singling out first-generation students — the administration has been hesitant, for example, to offer them a specialized “bridge” program in the summer before their freshman year. Khurana waves the accusation off, saying that as a college Harvard is still figuring out how best to help. “I told the task force to imagine that we can create the best environment possible for these kids — no constraints,” he says. “What is the ideal? Can we create relationships earlier in their experience rather than later? Can we streamline certain forms of financial aid? It’s our goal to close this gap as quickly as possible.”ON A SUNDAY in mid-January, 18-year-old Alejandro Claudio has just packed up his duffel bag at his family’s first-floor apartment in a run-down triple-decker on Waldo Street in Providence’s West End. A crumbling statue of the Virgin Mary sits on the porch; next door is the Cranston Street Rescue Mission, a soup kitchen. It’s just a 15-minute drive across the city back to school after winter break, but to Claudio, dressed most days in his Brown sweat shirt and Red Sox cap, Brown is worlds away from the neighborhood where he grew up. On campus, his “perfect world up on the hill,” he feels removed from the worries at home — how his mom, a day-care provider, and his dad, a welder, are going to make their rent or keep their lights on. A political science, philosophy, and economics major, Claudio is well aware, though, that he must succeed. “If I fail, I’m going back to poverty, to working in a factory. I need to get good grades and get a job that pays well enough to help feed my family.”Claudio’s bright, windowed dorm room overlooks a grassy quad, and he can eat whenever he wants at the Ratty, the campus dining hall, because his meal plan is covered by his scholarship. During his first semester, friends looked at him like he had five heads when he said he’d never tasted falafel, kebabs, or curry. He had immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 8. “Growing up in a poor family, we ate the same thing every night: rice, beans, and chicken,” he says.Brown UniversityIt was at Providence’s predominantly Latino Central High School that Claudio, who would go on to be class valedictorian, decided he didn’t want a job in the fish factories where many of his friends’ parents worked. He believed he might actually escape the West End when he met Dakotah Rice, his coach on the debate team and an undergrad low-income student at Brown. They’d get together at a Burger King across from Central to talk about Claudio’s future and his chances of going to Brown. “He understood my background, and we’d talk for hours about how I could get in. He was like, ‘If I can do it, you can too,’ ” says Claudio. Now that he’s on campus, Claudio sees just how big a social gap exists between him and other students. It was easy to mistake other African-American and Latino students as coming from a similar socioeconomic background — but after striking up a conversation, Claudio was shocked to learn many were as moneyed as his white peers. At the first ice cream social, one student mentioned his dad was a lawyer and his mom a doctor, then asked Claudio what his parents did. When he told them his dad was a welder, the conversation ended awkwardly. Later in the semester, Claudio confided in a well-off friend that his mom was asking him for money to help pay bills. “I’m sorry,” the friend said, which made Claudio feel worse. He’s since stopped sharing his background so openly.After parachuting into a culture where many kids seem to have a direct line to prestigious internships through their well-off parents and feel entitled to argue with a professor over a grade, poor kids sense their disadvantage. Even if they’re in the same school as some of the nation’s smartest and best-connected young people, students’ socioeconomic backgrounds seem to dictate how they navigate campus. Research shows, for example, that upper-middle-class kids are better at asking for help at college than low-income ones, in part because they know the resources available to them. Disadvantaged students are accustomed to doing everything on their own because they rarely have parents educated enough to help them with things like homework or college applications, so they may be less likely to go to a writing center or ask a professor for extra help. Yolanda Rome, assistant dean for first-year and sophomore students at Brown, says many disadvantaged students have come to her in tears after getting a C on a paper. When she asks if they met with the instructor, the answer is typically no. “We’re working hard to change the campus culture,” she says, “so these students know that asking for help is not a weakness.”Anthony Jack, a resident tutor at Harvard alongside Jason Munster, is a PhD candidate in sociology studying low-income students at elite colleges. He says low-income students show up at his office every other week looking to vent about frustrations with campus life — or to ask a question they don’t know whom else to ask, like “How do I get a recommendation for a fellowship?” In his research, Jack looks at the experiences of both the “privileged poor,” low-income students who attend an elite, private high school before college, and the “doubly disadvantaged,” or students who aren’t familiar with the expectations and norms of elite colleges. His findings suggest that low-income students’ success on campus may be tied to the social and cultural capital they possess. For example, do they arrive with the same sense of entitlement as their more affluent peers, do they understand the importance of developing one-on-one relationships with professors to earn future recommendations?Brown is just a 15-minute ride from the apartment in Providence’s West End where Alejandro Claudio’s parents, Alejandro and Maribel Claudio, live.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFFJack says that the privileged poor adjust more easily to the campus culture than the doubly disadvantaged. The latter see professors as distant authority figures and feel guarded in approaching them, whereas the privileged poor, like upper-middle-class students, find it easier to cultivate the relationship. “You’re worth a professor’s time,” Jack will tell many of the students he mentors.Does this reluctance to ask for help ultimately impact graduation rates? Perhaps not as much at an Ivy League school as elsewhere. Nationally, the graduation rate for low-income, first-generation students in bachelor’s programs is about 11 percent, but that number increases dramatically at Ivy League schools, where most of the financial burden is lifted from students. According to data collected by I’m First, an online community for first-generation college students funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, at Harvard and Yale, 98 percent of students from minority groups underrepresented in college will graduate with a four-year degree within six years; at Brown, it’s 91 percent.When recent Brown graduate Renata Martin first came to campus, she had no idea how poor her family was back in the Newark area, where her dad works as a pizza delivery driver. “Everyone who lived around us was getting their lights shut off — that was my normal,” she says. She used her campus health insurance to see a therapist for help with her identity struggles, but she couldn’t afford the $15 copays. Martin, who attended Brown on a $90,000 Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, says, “Brown assumes that all students can afford small extras like that, but we can’t.” During lean weeks, she’d stop in to see the campus chaplain to apply for funds to buy a book she couldn’t afford or a bus ticket home. “It’s really hard to ask for help,” she says. “But I had to get used to telling professors my story or I wouldn’t have gotten through Brown.”Beth Breger is the executive director of Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, a nonprofit that helps prepare 100 high-achieving, low-income high school juniors per year for college and the application process. Its students spend seven weeks on Princeton University’s campus to study leadership and attend seminars on things like writing, standardized-test prep, and campus life. They’re introduced to the resources that exist on campus, like the career center, where they can learn how to network and prepare for job interviews. “Our students are very capable of doing the work academically, but we help them with social and cultural aspects of school: why it’s important to meet with their academic adviser and professors, how to access a health center. We don’t want them to feel like taking advantage of these resources is a weakness.” Bridge programs with similar goals exist for incoming freshmen at Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Says Breger: “There’s a confidence issue with these kids. Many have never met a corporate lawyer or Wall Street trader. They don’t have a parent offering them a lens into the professional world. We try to broaden their perspective.”WHEN JUNIOR Julia Dixon steps inside the small cafeteria at Trumbull College at Yale, the short-order cook flipping hamburgers lights up: “Hi, Ms. Julia, what can I get for you today?” A man stacking crates of clean glasses says to the Southern-born Dixon: “Ms. Julia, it’s too cold for a Georgia peach today, isn’t it?” Wearing black-rimmed glasses and lipstick the color of Japanese eggplant, Dixon may be a long way from her childhood as the second oldest of 11 growing up on food stamps in rural Georgia. But she sees the dining room workers as family. In fact, when her parents rented a car and drove up to visit, they were nervous around Dixon’s friends — but they asked to meet the cafeteria workers. “Can you watch out for my baby girl?” her father asked the short-order cooks. That her parents reached out to dining hall staff on their one visit to campus, rather than a professor or faculty member, gets at the heart of the split identity Dixon has grappled with since her freshman year.She’s come to see herself as “Georgia Julia” and “Yale Julia,” and reconciling the two identities is complicated. Even her parents sense the change. On her second (and most recent) visit home in the three years she’s been at school, her father voiced concern at dinner one night that her education might cause her to drift away from them. “I don’t want you to be ashamed of us,” he said. At first, Dixon wouldn’t talk to her parents about what she was going through at school — a tough class she was taking, how much money she had in her bank account. She’s since realized that the only way to stay connected to them is to talk openly about her problems, even if most of what she’s experiencing is foreign to them.Poor students may feel out of place at an Ivy League school, but over time, they may feel as if they don’t belong at home, either. “Often, they come to college thinking that they want to return home to their communities,” says Rome, the Brown official. “But an Ivy League education puts them in a different place — their language is different, their appearance is different, and they don’t fit in at home anymore, either.”Ellie Dupler, a junior global affairs major at Yale with wavy, reddish-brown hair and silver hoop earrings she picked up in Turkey on a Yale-funded trip, lived in a trailer with her single mother in northern Michigan until she was in the sixth grade. In high school, she took a public bus two hours each way to a better public school than the one in her hometown. She’s on a tight budget when we meet at Blue State coffeehouse in New Haven. “I’m waiting for a check from financial aid, so I’ve been skipping some meals,” she says. Even so, Dupler says Yale has given her a false sense of financial security. “Frankly, the longer I’m here, the less that I feel I identify with having a low-income background.”Along with working three jobs, she’s on the school’s ski team — her mom operated the chairlift at a resort near her hometown, and Dupler could ski for free. When she shared her background with some of her teammates, they were surprised. “I would have never have known you were low income,” one told her. Her best friend, who is from a wealthy suburb of New York City, helps her out when she needs it, though Dupler says she’s quick to repay her. Dupler thinks she’s been able to blend in more easily at Yale than some other low-income students because she’s white. “Typically, unless I disclose my background in some way, I’m assumed to be just like most of the other white students who grew up upper middle class in a perfect house in the suburbs,” she says. She likes seeing herself through other students’ eyes. Maybe it’s even convinced her that she can live a different kind of life.Still, graduation looms, and she worries about making it without the security of a Yale scholarship. “I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?” As a result, she says, she’s become obsessed with her career. “My friends joke that my aspirations change weekly.” She’s currently set on getting a graduate degree in law and public policy and eventually a career in international relations.Julia Dixon says she tries not to see money as the most defining element of her identity anymore. Yale has shown her a life where dinner conversations don’t revolve around overdue bills. She’s using the time to think about her future — without worrying about the financial means she needs to get there. “Money is something I’ve learned to disassociate from. Maybe I see these four years as my chance to dream.”Brooke Lea Foster is a writer in New York. Send comments to [email protected] THE NUMBERS38% — Share of undergraduates at four-year schools whose parents did not attend college1 in 10 — Number of people from low-income families who attain a bachelor’s degree by age 25 (half of the people from high-income families do)4.5 million — Number of low-income, first-generation students enrolled in post-secondary education, about 24 percent of the undergraduate populationSources: US Department of Education; Russell Sage Foundation; the Pell InstituteBROWN GROUP BRINGS FIRST-GENS FROM MANY CAMPUSES TOGETHERBy Emeralde Jensen-RobertsEsther Maddox from Princeton, Jasmine Fernandez from Harvard, and Kujegi Camara, also from Princeton, attended an open dialogue session at Brown’s 1vyG conference for first-generation students in February.GRETCHEN ERTLA new group at Brown brings first-gens from many campuses together to agitate for change.On a frosty Saturday morning in February, more than 200 students, some wearing sleek business suits, file in to Brown University’s C.V. Starr auditorium. As they wait for the day’s program to start, they sit in small, chatty packs, picking at blueberry muffins and sipping coffee from paper cups. Some take selfies with friends, later tweeted and hashtagged “1vyG2015.”Hailing from Brown and 15 other schools, some Ivies and some not, the students and more than 20 college administrators are here at the invitation of 1vyG, a first-generation student network launched last year at Brown. 1vyG’s founders, juniors Manuel Contreras, Jessica Brown, and Stanley Stewart, have been studying the obstacles that first-generation students like them face at Brown, and the three-day conference, believed to be the first of its kind, is a natural extension of that. Are students at other schools dealing with the same challenges, and how can they share information to help improve campus life for all?The weekend’s workshops are geared to fostering discussion between first-generation students and administrators and to boosting students’ coping skills on campus and beyond. Sessions include Navigating Class and Culture on Campus, Building a Career as a First-Gen, and Coaching College-Bound Students to Succeed.Contreras comes away from the event determined to repeat it. “At bare minimum, we’re going to be an annual rotating conference,” he says, with different schools playing host. Additional ambitions at Brown include setting up a textbook lending library and establishing a mentorship program to connect incoming students with current first-generation upperclassmen and alumni.The ultimate goal remains constant: keep pushing schools to broaden their view and keep encouraging students to find strength through their shared experience. “I want first-gens to be connected, [to] feel happy and that they belong,” says Contreras. “You may be the first, but you’re not alone.”

Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers is one of the best books published on what it is like to work at a highly selective college or university admission office. Steinberg was given almost unheard of access to the way Wesleyan conducts the business of selecting students who best fit their institutional needs.My short answer is pretty simple: Yes and No. I will try to show why this seeming contradiction forms a larger frame that has room for both ways of painting the picture.Given that the book, at least by today’s standards, is old, the first thing to address is whether the book still accurately describes what goes on in admission at Wesleyan. For those who have not read the book, a bit of plot summary might be useful. I use the word plot because although the book is not a novel, it does trace the story of one particular admission officer, Ralph Figueroa, and the fates of a number of students too.The focus on one office and one person allows Steinberg to let the life he depicts stand for the larger admission office staff at Wesleyan and for selective admission officers as a whole. We follow Ralph through an admission season, which includes recruiting trips to schools that in some cases are looked at as among the best in the US, and others that serve the Native American population who have tremendous challenges in front of them. We also see that “reading season’ is a several month journey into the stats, words and activities of thousands of talented students. There is little else that goes on in an admission officer’s life except evaluation during this period of time. However, once the reading season ends there are recruitment activities that are necessary for helping to enroll the lucky few who have been admitted. And shortly after that the whole cycle begins again. The book was originally a part of Steinberg’s excellent NY Times Choice Blog. (Unfortunately, he no longer writes the blog. It is still a great resource; even the old entries are useful.)We also get to follow the admission process through the experiences of students who have applied to a variety of selective schools and we discover what their outcomes are. We come to root for some as we read the book and we share in the good news and are moved by how hard it is when some get told no. As a whole, the book lets people in on some inside views of both schools and students as they go through what has become a much more complicated and much more competitive process than it used to be even a generation ago. Most parents say, and rightly so, that they would never get in to most of the highly selective schools that they were accepted to given the huge increase in applications from around the US and the world. Acceptance rates have fallen dramatically at top schools, something I have addressed before. It is not only much harder than it used to get accepted in to top schools, it is much harder to predict who will get in top schools too.The book, which came out in 2002, nevertheless, still rings true in a number of important ways. In fact, Wesleyan had Mr. Steinberg back on campus not that long ago (2013) and listed ten things he got right about the admission process. I won’t list all of them, but there are three that I think need a bit of a gloss.Wesleyan practices “holistic” admissions. There’s no SAT cut-off or minimum GPA to get into Wesleyan. Nothing as staunchly empirical as the University of Michigan’s longtime admissions formula. Instead, admissions officers combine numbers like GPAs and test scores with raw, human decisions regarding abstract qualities like “character,” “diversity,” and “merit.” (Of course, that’s not to mention the obviously charged negotiations over legacy admits, athletic recruits, celebrity children, and talented oboists.) Steinberg intimately examines an unscientific, complicated admissions process whose (largely antisemitic) origins Malcolm Gladwell later traced in a popular New Yorker article, “Getting In.” It’s messy stuff, and sometimes there are no easy answers, as in the case of Mig Pensoneau, a Native-American applicant with a rough academic history who ends up dropping out of Wesleyan.I applaud the writers of the Wesleyan overview for being far more forthcoming about the quirks that are a part of ‘holistic’ admission. From a shady past that was part of an effort to suppress Jewish students from going Ivy (the better place to find out about this is to read the long but worth reading book The Chosen), holistic admission is the screening process that lets them look at more than just numbers. Most student and families support the abstract notion of holistic admission until they find out how much falls under this rubric. Holistic admission can mean a legacy at a school gets a boost, and in some schools this boost is huge, Holistic admission can mean that an athlete with less than stellar academics in virtually every measurable way may still be invited to join one of the most elite schools in the US. Each school has its own institutional priorities and holistic admission gives them leeway to pursue what they think is in the best interest of the school. It's important to remember that schools are first and foremost about what is best for them even if this means that some students will discover that despite having doe all about anyone can do to get into the school, they still will end up short. What drives some parents and students to distraction (and a few to law suits) is that they “know” another student with much weaker credentials got accepted. And it is likely true that there are students on the most elite campuses whose academic credentials are far weaker. Wesleyan, again with uncharacteristic openness, admits this:Wesleyan really wants more science students and more athletes. Wesleyan remains one of the few top liberal arts colleges where science majors can expect to do original research as undergraduates, and Steinberg’s book reveals how a proven interest in science can give you a huge boost in the admissions process. (A former admissions officer tells Steinberg, “Someone once asked me, ‘Would you take a kid with high physics scores and nothing else?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ The faculty wants them, and the faculty needs them.”) It also reveals Wesleyan’s longtime struggle to be taken seriously on the athletic fields. Steinberg interviews former Dean of Admissions and current Vice President for University Relations Barbara-Jan Wilson, who apparently went to great lengths to improve communication between the admissions officers and coaches. (“I always believed that if the New York Times wanted to write about a draft dodger, they’d call us,” Wilson tells Steinberg. “If they were looking for a good student athlete, they’d call Williams.” But this is a source of frustration: “At Wesleyan you could find a great student athlete,” she protests. “It’s a stereotype.”)These words are one place that helps to answer your question in specific terms. Wesleyan is different than some of the other highly ranked schools in its commitment to giving an edge in admission to students who have a passion for the sciences. As the school is more well known for its arts and humanities and social science the school wishes to increase the number of science students to make sure there is a balance and to ensure there are enough students talking classes in the sciences as majors. This would certainly not be true at a place, for example, at a school like MIT. They might give an edge to the poet or the artist over a strong science student. Each of the top schools has slightly different institutional priorities and so what Steinberg writes about applies in specific terms to one school. Nevertheless, each school does have its own way of giving certain individuals or groups an edge in admission.The last of the things that Wesleyan says that Steinberg gets right is in some ways the most controversial:Wesleyan admissions officers are often in close contact with guidance counselors at top prep schools. If you went to Exeter or Trinity or whatever, chances are your guidance counselor told Wesleyan about you. The Gatekeepers traces a long-term friendship between Ralph Figueroa and college classmate Sharon Merrow, who becomes a dean at the Harvard-Westlake School. Merrow frequently gives Ralph hints about her favorite students, and nudges him for insider tips when they end up applying to Wes. In the case of Julianna Bentes, Ralph had been secretly tracking her since she was in ninth grade. (Creepy? Don’t hate the player, hate the game.)There are many stories in the media about how students from privilege get all sorts of advantages when applying to the most selective schools. The data is there to show that students whose parents make above the top 1% have a distinct edge in admission. Some argue that this should happen as the students attend great schools and have the opportunity to do things outside of school that costs a lot of money (summer camps, travel, internships via networking etc.). The things I have just mentioned should certainly be looked at as ways a student may stand out in ways those who cannot afford these opportunities cannot. This is simply, to me, the way that life is unfair to those who are not at the high end of the income bracket.What The Gatekeepers shows, however, that not only does attending a great school provides wonderful educational opportunities, it also provides the student with access to admission officers that the vast majority of students do not have. If an admission officer has a great working relationship with a counselor and the counselor calls an admission officer to lobby on behalf of an individual or group of students this does seem an unfair advantage. The final comment from Wesleyan’s writers "don’t hate the player hate the game", sounds like a nice sound bite but it still makes it easy to overlook what a small group of students get that most don’t. Having said this however, a number of the top schools have made great efforts to visit schools and communities that are primarily low income. Harvard, Princeton and Yale have done this for years. Other schools, who do not have as much money set aside for financial aid, simply cannot afford to do as much. But The Gatekeepers also shows that Ralph makes a special effort to encourage Native Americans to apply to Wesleyan. Most schools do not target this group, but some target low-income students and almost all target other under-represented groups. Once again, each school will have a slightly different approach depending on what it feels will best support their needs academically, on the playing field, in certain academic majors ad among targeted groups of students.NoIf The Gatekeepers still has much to teach us about how selective admission works, it also does not address in a substantive way a number of things that have become much larger issues since the book was published. It also does not address how far apart some schools are from each other in using these things that affect admission decisions. I will mention just a few.Early Decision/EarlyAction:One of the factors that is a part of US News rankings is selectivity. The more applications a school gets is one part of the equation but the other is what the response rate of those students who are offered admission. At about the time The Gatekeepers came out there was a rush for the top schools to get rid of early decision. This came about after stats were published that demonstrated that the vast majority of all ED students were not eligible for financial aid. Needy students often shop for the best package they could find, so applying early could limit their choices. Remember that Early Decision is a binding agreement. If a student applies Early Decision and is accepted then the student has to withdraw all other applications. The advantage for early decision for schools is that the more they take early (which happens in November/December) the fewer they will have to offer to in regular decision.Regular decision notifications go out in March or early April and at that point a student will typically have a number of schools to choose from. Getting students to apply ED means that they will have no other choice if accepted and this increases the yield (the percentage of student who accept offers). Harvard and Princeton tried to get the movement going, but it did not filter down and a few schools that did follow have backed off in some way. In almost every other case when HPY does something big, others scramble to follow the leader but not this case. Very few changed (and some that did change have since changed back to either early decision or early action.) Why? It was not in their best interest from an institutional perspective. Harvard, Princeton and Yale's yield is already very high.1 Harvard has the highest yield rate of any school (see chart) other schools not that far down the top schools list do not have that luxury.Wesleyan, for example, has two ED plans. One has a November 1 deadline and the other Jan1. This dual strategy helps them because while some students may have applied to other top schools early in November they have heard whether they have been admitted by Mid-December. If they have been turned town at their original top choice they still can apply ED by Jan 1. Why would a student want to apply ED? The answer is simple. The acceptance rate for ED students is much higher than it is for regular decision. It is a significant advantage because the schools benefit from enrolling many strong students who are locked in as enrolling students. Duke, this year filled almost 50% of its class through ED. This means that the competition for regular decision candidates will be far, far tougher than it was for the ED students. Places like Penn make it clear that ED is an advantage too.Early action, which some schools, like Harvard, Princeton and Yale offer, also has a November deadline, but should a student be offered admission they are not required to withdraw all other applications and commit to enroll. A student will hear a decision before the Jan 1 application regular decision deadline from other schools, but almost anyone who gets in to the HYP early action will go. This is not as true for most other schools that offer EA. However, they use the time they have from December to the May 1 national reply date (when deposits to schools are due) to woo students. They invite them for special programs and send unending emails etc. They recruit in ways that were largely unheard of a decade ago including Tweets, Facebook pages, Instagram, blogs etc.I tell students who are looking at places like the Ivies, Stanford, and Wesleyan that they should plan on applying to a school early. ED is a bit trickier as it is binding, but the benefit in terms of getting in now weighs so heavily that it may be worth it. See chart for differences in acceptance rates for early vs. regular decisionAs already mentioned, low income students do not apply early nearly as often as those that can pay because they want to weigh the aid options they might get. Low-income student may face more challenges because of early programs but schools with lots of aid money try to give low-income student a break in admission and provide generous funding too. This year Harvard, for example, offered to a significantly higher proportion of low-income students EA than they did the year before.Profile:If there is one easy way to see how top schools are different from one another in terms of admission and, as a consequence, in terms of the make up of the study body, it is through a document called the profile. Typically, a profile describes the applicant pool, the students who have been offered admission and the students who have accepted the offer. It is meant to give families, students and educators a snapshot of the kinds of students who fit in the mix of enrolling students. While what I have just written is accurate as far as it goes, it is also far from comprehensive. A profile is also a marketing tool. Students and families can learn a lot about what the school values by looking at what information the schools include in their published profiles ad what information they leave out too.Harvard, for example, on their official admitted student profile does not list any academic numbers. There is nothing listed about Rank in Class, GPA or SAT/ACT scores. Instead they list the number of applications, the number admitted, where the applications apply from, the race of the students and financial aid information. Why would they leave out the stats that most would want to see when deciding whether a student has much of a chance of being admitted? Harvard is smart. If they listed the numbers I have just mentioned it would discourage many students form applying. Don’t believe me? Here are the stats that were left out as published by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper:The average self-reported unweighted GPA on a 4.0 scale was 3.94. Fifty-four percent of students reported a perfect 4.0.Freshmen reported an average composite SAT score of 2237. The reported average subject score was consistent across the three sections, with an average of 748 in the math section, 746 on writing, and 744 on critical reading.Source: Harvard CrimsonThese daunting numbers might discourage students that Harvard wants to apply (and in some cases enroll. For example low income and under-represented students, have, as I have mentioned, lower scores in the aggregate compared to other groups. Harvard wants to recruit more of these students and posting numbers that say that only near perfection gets in will discourage applications. Remember that schools' rankings are affected by how many applications they get, so Harvard is casting a wide net. There have been a number of stories condemning highly selective schools for encouraging applications from students who have no chance of getting in, something I have written about (and actually defend when it comes to the decision of schools to encourage or dissuade students from applying). Given the institutional priorities of enrolling a diverse student body it makes sense for Harvard to downplay how hard it is to get in.Wesleyan’s profile is far different than Harvard’s. While they too list the number of applicants, number accepted and enrolled, they also provide some numeric data. For a small school like Wesleyan and for ultra competitive schools like Harvard they are trying to make each space count. How they count however, is somewhat different.Here are some details from the Wesleyan profile:SAT: 2100 averageClass RankingClass Rank Reported 31%Top 10%: 63% of enrolled studentsTop 20%: 83% of enrolled studentsSecondary SchoolPublic 49%Other 51%Wesleyan demonstrates that they are a school that looks for most of its student to have high test scores. Despite all the critics of the SAT/ACT, standardized tests doe predict well at the end of the bell cure. Both Harvard and Wesleyan look for students who are near the top of the testing spectrum. What is different, however, between Harvard and Wesleyan is how many students at Wesleyan were not necessarily at or near the top of their secondary school class It needs to be noted that most private high schools and many highly ranked public schools do not rank students as they know that many students outside the top 1o% are often penalized at this statistic is used by the US News rankings. While many schools will simply turn down students who are not in the top 10%, Wesleyan does not follow this model. It is rare indeed for a top ranked school to enroll nearly 40% of its ranked students out of the top 10%. Harvard on the other hand, has almost an entire class in the top 10% and of those many are in the top 1%. The majority of its students have perfect grades. These differences between the schools are significant. Wesleyan looks to enroll students who are great testers but may not have had perfect grades.Another difference between Harvard (I am using Harvard as shorthand for all the Ivies, Stanford and a few other of the most selective universities and colleges) and Wesleyan is the percentage of public school students they enroll. Less than half of the class comes from public schools at Wesleyan. Over 61% of Harvard’s students come from public schools; small liberal arts colleges often draw many of their students form private schools. These students are used to the Harkness table and other seminar classes that are small, and they know they will find this in many of their classes at places like Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury etc.Finally, schools will have will be differences between male/female percentages and racial composition.. Small Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) tend to draw far more female applicants than males. Males, the theory goes, often want to go to places that have big time sports programs (This statement applies only to the aggregate. I know some female fans that are as rabid supporters of their school as any 10 men put together). There is sort of an unwritten law however that highly selective Liberal Arts Colleges will never enroll a class over 61% female. This brings up the issue as to whether it is harder for females to get in and the answer, it seems, is yes.There is some good data about this but since holistic admission permits schools to keep at least some institutional priorities under wraps, Wesleyan and 56% females They do list this on their profile, as it is, for a liberal arts school, a good statistic. It will not discourage males from applying. (Surprisingly, perhaps, applications from males tend to drop when the female percentage at schools is too high.)Harvard does not even list the male/female percentage on their official profile. The student newspaper posts it: 50.1% male. If I had to guess why this statistic is not included, it is because it is too perfect. The institutional goals again affect individual students. I could be wrong and it is random that the percentage is perfect, but if I had to guess the Harvard admission office uses data on male/female offers, acceptance rates and lots data analysis to try to achieve the ‘perfect’ mix.While gender balance at schools may differ or may be perfect, there is another issue that The Gatekeepers does not address in any detail that has become an increasingly reported to the public --the percentage of Asians that are a part of each entering class. Both Harvard and Wesleyan have about 20% Asians populations in the their incoming class. This percentage is far higher than it used to be for both schools, but given the performance of Asians in class and on the SAT the percentages it could (and some would say should) well be higher. Asians score better on the SAT than anyone else by a wide margin and there is now a law suit that has been filed on behalf of Asians who were not admitted to Harvard. I won’t go into detail as I have written about this issue before, but from the stats that have been gathered it looks like, from the outside, that it is far harder for Asians to get a spot at the Ivies. Whether this is true at some other schools is harder to tell. At schools like Berkeley that are largely number driven for admission, Asians comprise nearly half the class.Deep DataWhile The Gatekeepers show the human side of admission officers’ jobs and how they advocate for individual students, it does not address in detail what has now become a reality in any “business” today—deep data. Schools can now run numbers and stats that vastly improve the information they need to recruit students they most wish to enroll to meet their institutional needs.In addition, they can run data to help enroll the students they accept. The human touch is certainly still an important part of the process, but now it is supported by much more information than was available even a few short years ago. The most selective schools are not dependent on deep data to enroll great students, but they can use the information to get exactly what they want. Schools that are out of the group of the most elite institutions now need the deep data as they have issues with finding enough students to enroll to meet enrollment goals (getting enough students and enough students who can afford the costs).Ability to payAt schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they have enough money set aside to support any student they admit who does not have the ability to pay. But the number of schools, even highly selective schools, who have this ability shrinks each year. There are schools that say they meet full need, and that is accurate, but they can say this because they are “need aware” when making decisions. The cost of education at the most selective schools now is in excess of $60,000 a year. There are few schools left that have the resources to pay for all the qualified low-income students who might add to the mix of students. The high cost of education has now become a much bigger topic than it was when The Gatekeeperscame out. The debt load on students now, in the aggregate, exceeds the debt during the housing bubble. Changes need to happen and while the new Obama plan may help some attend community college for free, those still hoping to get into the most selective schools without adequate funds will, except for the very elite schools, face tougher odds.Marketing, enrollment management, demonstrated interest, The Common ApplicationThe last series of things that have changed since The Gatekeepers came out logically follow from several things I have already mentioned.. Schools are trying to market themselves in ways that will improve their rankings. They are using data to do this but also have been given large budgets and increased staff to attract the students that will help them fulfill their mission. One of the big changes that has come about is something I have mentioned in other posts—the deans of admission have gradually been replaced at many colleges and universities by enrollment mangers. This is not the case at the Ivies the most selective LACs, but at many selective schools, the deans of admission are not the ones in charge of the much more broad based and bureaucratic effort to get exactly the mix of students they both want and need. For example, schools look increasingly at a students’ “demonstrated interest” in the school. Those who have not visited, have not opened emails sent by the school, and who have not shown other ways that they know the school and see it as a fit may not be offered admission as the schools think the student has probably put their particular school low on the list of places to enroll.Remember that yield of students is a crucial part of what drives rankings. Part of what has happened since The Gatekeepers has been a significant rise in the number of applications an individual student applies to. It used to be 6 or 8 was perceived as more than enough. For those seeking admission at highly selective schools this is a low number now. The competition to get in has increased so much that it is hard to tell if a student will be admitted; therefore, students will submit more applications in hopes that at least one top school will say yes. There are many students now who submit more that 12 applications and this has been aided by The Common Application. In the last few years the number of schools that use this form has rise significantly. Students go to their portal and fill out information that can then be sent, with a push of a button, to hundreds of schools. The most elite schools use The Common Application, although most also have supplements that require additional essays and other information. Nevertheless, the technology has made it much easier to apply to more schools which in turn makes it more difficult for schools to know how serious the student is about enrolling. This cycle brings us back to what I said above: early decision and early action numbers have risen as students use this to demonstrate interest and schools use it to increase yield.All told, the whole process has taken on a much more bureaucratic and business like approach. At the same time, schools can now craft individualized emails and tweets and other marketing efforts to woo students. Schools are reaching larger audience all over the world and the crafting marketing strategies that speak directly to individual students. Some call the whole admission process arbitrary, but the way schools at the top select students is anything but.For those trying to get in, the whole process has become a huge time commitment and it is incredibly complex and confusing .As a result, families are seeking extra help. There has been a huge increase in the number of private counselors who help families negotiate all the variables. When The Gatekeepers came out, private counselors were often looked at in negative terms by schools, but the reality now is that the schools (in some cases) depend on these counselors to help great students stand out (and even in some cases to provide the schools themselves with information that will help them with decisions. I feel sorry for students and families now. The process which was already full of stress on these wonderful students who Steinberg so movingly portrays in his book has now increased by orders of magnitude. Students keep continue to ask directly or indirectly what the top schools look for and what is the ideal student.Each school has different answers, but at the most selective schools the answers are far more complex than they used to be. How much more complicated can things get? It is hard to know the answer to this very tough question. My answer will have to wait as I really do not know. I only hope that there might be a slowing of the arms race that are the rankings games so that students could begin to worry more about finding the best fit rather than the highest ranking school. I am not optimistic this will happen any time soon.***********************************************************************1: It surprises some people to see the vast differences in yield rates but it should not. Most students tend to accept the offer of the school with the highest ranking. I wish more students would think about match and also about whether it is in their best interest to compete with many of the most successful secondary students in the world for 4 years. The stress of trying to keep up is high